NUMBERS

On Nantasket Beach, October 2019. Candid Photo by Peter Petraitis.

I will turn 70 soon. Now that actually means I have been living my 70th year for almost its entirety. I don't really know why that gives me some comfort. I guess I have always been more interested in accomplishment than prospectus.

When I was a depressed pre-teen, a significantly depressed one at that, I used to secretly predict my death at the age of 30. That morphed into a secret prediction of my becoming blind at 30. Those predictions were simply symptoms of my agony over feeling a total misfit in my world. I was big for my age and clumsy. A sledding accident had removed half of one of my front teeth. The remaining half turned black and polluted my breath. Let's just say I wasn't a beauty.

Birthdays became hollow celebrations in those depressed years. My mother's birthday was close to mine. She gladly consolidated the two events to avoid the expense and bother of celebrating both. We shared a birthday cake, which she made. And I didn't have enough friends to warrant a party. My mother, however, had a girl gang, now all matrons, who had been in high school together. They had a birthday card party in her honor each year. 

My father's Great Depression childhood was all too brief. He didn't like birthdays at all. To make it worse, his birthday fell on the due date of annual income taxes. 

These numbered and tallied years have always seemed unreflective of my inner life's gravity. When my physician gave me a six month prognosis when I was 45. he said something to the effect that he regretted my impending death would be happening to me at a young age. I was relieved. I was working 60 hours a week, including night shifts as the director of an AIDS hospice. My total lack of an immune system made each day an Everest climb. 

"Normal" people grinned and made a deal out of my 50th. My remarkable avoidance of cremation (resurrection?) due to new pharmacology seemed to delight them more than it delighted me. I was barely scraping by financially and physically. There was no bodily ascension into Heaven on my horizon, just more years of the same or worse. That is life with chronic illness, no matter what hype you may see in media.

And that was almost twenty years ago. Since then, I struggled with cancer and its aftermath. I also bought and flipped several houses to make ends meet, since returning to my career as a hands-on nurse was out of the question. I saw both my parents through their last years. One at 83, the other at 91. 

Meeting my partner over sixteen years ago as we both recovered from the same cancer was the one sustaining event of my last twenty years. He turned 70 several months ago. He too resurrected from near-death from AIDS. Talk about luck! Adding those variables together would have discouraged me from ever suspecting I would be happily sharing my life with a loving and lovable partner now. 

All this is meant to convey the idea that living by numbers has been irrelevant in my life. I have not followed the track of billions whose lives have been framed for them, decade by decade, by parents and grandparents. I have survived and progressed by being an individual, often fumbling my way along. The fumbling, and frequent falling, has left my inner being quite seasoned, like kiln-dried wood. It is tough, but still pliable enough to shape.

And what about moving forward? As the year 2020 opens ahead, I am here in the present, a present which is untouched to some degree by the past or the future. Each day dawns and darkens inevitably. My quest is to stay mentally alive and physically active as long as possible. Do I feel I have conscious control of my life's future? Of course not. What I can control is how I consciously choose to ride that tide of time each day.